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“He looks a little thinner than he was, but he looks good,” Smith said. “He was thoughtful and softspoken, as I knew him to be.”

Brantly’s battle against Ebola, which he contracted in Liberia while serving a charity, made international headlines. He was flown in a specially outfitted aircraft to an isolation unit at Emory University Hospital near Atlanta as his condition began to decline. After he recovered from the often-fatal disease, Brantly was released from the hospital Aug. 21 and has been in seclusion with his family in North Carolina.

“I felt like I was about to die,” Brantly said during an in-depth interview that was aired in pieces Tuesday and Wednesday.

He described how on July 23, he woke up under the weather.

“I woke up that morning and I felt a little off,” Brantly said.

Brantly’s wife, Amber, and children weren’t in Liberia when he contracted the disease — for which he was thankful. The entire family had moved with him to West Africa, but his wife and children were on a trip to the United States when he fell ill.

“That would have been an overwhelming mental burden if I had woken up sick lying next to my wife with one of my children snuggled up next to me,” Brantly said.

Amber Brantly said she was all too familiar with Ebola when she got the phone call telling her he had tested positive for the disease.

“I know how it ends,” she told NBC. “I was scared.”

The 2014 Ebola outbreak is one of the largest ever, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus has torn through Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, leaving more than 1,552 dead.